Billy Beane

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“Information Ties The Fans To The Game”

September 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Even geniuses aren’t perfect: Billy Beane is the GM of the last-place Oakland A’s and Bill James Senior Advisor to the last-place Boston Red Sox, but they’re two of the pivotal figures in the development and popularization of Sabermetrics. In fact, James is likely the most influential of them all.

Of course, some bright people have the propensity to overthink things and outsmart themselves. For no real reason, Beane decided to trade affordable MVP candidate Josh Donaldson in the offseason for a couple of decent players and perhaps a great future shortstop, even though his team was built to compete now and playing in a very winnable division.

James’ sins haven’t been so slight, not just limited to puzzling player personnel decisions. He’s gone out of his way to defend Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who clearly looked the other way while a pedophilia scandal was brewing right in front of his black glasses. In this case, James’ contrarian streak, which made him great, also laid him low.

The two figures had never appeared in public together until last week’s business-disruption conference hosted by NetSuite. Brian Costa of the Wall Street Journal gathered them and moderated a discussion about the future of Sabermetrics, etc. An excerpt:

WSJ:

Clearly, sabermetrics has improved the management of the game tremendously. How, if at all, has it made baseball a better game to watch?

Bill James:

I don’t know that it has, but we produce information, and information ties the fans to the game. People in a culture with no information about baseball have no interest in baseball. If you give people a little bit of information about baseball, they have a little bit of interest, and if you give them a lot of information about baseball, there’s the potential that they have a lot of interest. I’ve lived most of my life in the fans’ world and I see what I do as a fan’s activity. Granted, I work for the Red Sox. But I do know also that there are fans who go to sleep cursing my name.

Billy Beane:

It’s a different generation of fan that now has exposure and an interest in why things happen. Give them some rational reason for outcomes. We’re an information-hungry society, and one that is constantly trying to understand. I think there are a group of kids who love it for the numbers and love it for the information.

WSJ:

We’ve seen advances in particular areas of the game in recent years—pitch framing, defensive shifts—that are now better understood. What do you guys see as the aspect of the sport that is most in need of more research, more data and better understanding?

Billy Beane:

I’m jumping out of my chair on this one. It’s using analytics—and this sounds sort of non-field-related—but it’s injuries and medical. Even the healthcare industry is doing the same thing – trying to use big data to help solve healthcare. It’s the same in a simpler form for baseball or any sport and injuries. That’s the black swan for anyone involved in a baseball team—our injuries. Trying to predict them, minimize them, limit the downtime.•

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“There Will Be An IT Coach At Some Point In The Dugout”

March 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

In the years since the work of Eric Walker, Sandy Alderson, Billy Beane, Paul DePodesta and others culminated in the literary and big-screen versions of Moneyball, baseball analytics has become a never-ending space race of sorts.

In “Beane Counters,” Jonah Keri of Grantland, no stranger to those trying to eke out wins on the margins, visits with “Brad Pitt” and Lew Wolff, the Oakland A’s owner, as the team with a terrible stadium and economic disadvantages tries to win its third straight division title. An excerpt:

While Moneyball the book and especially Moneyball the movie pumped up certain aspects of the A’s success while downplaying certain others (Messieurs Zito, Mulder, Hudson, Tejada, and Chavez would surely like a word), they perfectly pegged Beane’s distrust of industry insiders. While acknowledging that Melvin’s playing experience helped his candidacy for the manager job, Beane admitted to still harping on the value of outsiders’ perspectives when hiring people for other positions.

“I don’t want a lot of guys like me who played the game,” Beane said. “Quite frankly, I want blank canvases, I want people to come in with new ideas. I don’t want the biases of their own experiences to be a part of their decision-making process. Listen, our whole staff — [assistant GM] David [Forst] played at Harvard, but that doesn’t count because it’s Harvard — didn’t really play. The bottom line is that any business should be a meritocracy. The best and brightest. Period. This game is now evolving into that.”

Beane credited Michael Lewis for helping to spark that shift.

“That’s the best thing about the book and what it became,” Beane said. “I just talked to a young lady, a freshman at Santa Barbara. She’s taking a course, and Moneyball’s one of the required readings. This young lady could dream of one day becoming a general manager. That would have been much harder to imagine 15 years ago.”

One of those outsiders could be in the dugout before long, Beane said. Given the challenge of watching for subtle physical cues such as pitcher fatigue while also cycling through the many possible strategies and outcomes during the course of a game, managers and bench coaches would seemingly benefit greatly from employing a new aide.

“There will be an IT coach at some point” in the dugout, crunching numbers in real time and sitting right next to the manager, Beane said. The A’s have yet to actually create such a position for very practical reasons. “It would be an extra coach, and [MLB] is pretty strict — we aren’t even allowed walkie-talkies,’ Beane said about league restrictions on how many coaches a team can have, and what kind of contact they can have with the outside world during games. “But I believe at some point this will happen. There’s too much data that’s available not to want to use it.”•

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“Who Am I, And Why Would I Be Considered Some Sort Of Expert On Moneyball?”

May 14, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

At present, there are 13 used copies of Eric Walker’s oddly titled, out-of-print 1982 baseball-themed paperback, The Sinister First Baseman & Other Observations, on sale from Amazon sellers, and the cheapest one, in merely “Acceptable” condition, goes for $104.96. Who, exactly, is Eric Walker and why does he have so much value for so few people?

There were always those who suspected that baseball’s conventional wisdom was not so wise, but in the 1970s, Walker, a Bay Area baseball fan birthed the idea of Moneyball before Sandy Alderson or Billy Beane had entered the game. Even he, however, had an important precursor. From “The Forgotten Man of Moneyball,” Walker’s 2009 Deadspin article, a passage about his inspiration:

But who am I, and why would I be considered some sort of expert on moneyball? Perhaps you recognized my name; more likely, though, you didn’t. Though it is hard to say this without an appearance of personal petulance, I find it sad that the popular history of what can only be called a revolution in the game leaves out quite a few of the people, the outsiders, who actually drove that revolution. 

Anyway, the short-form answer to the question is that I am the fellow who first taught Billy Beane the principles that Lewis later dubbed ‘moneyball.’ For the long-form answer, we ripple-dissolve back in time to San Francisco in 1975, where the news media are reporting, often and at length, on the supposed near-certainty that the Giants will be sold and moved. There sit I, a man no longer young but not yet middle-aged, a man who has not been to a baseball game — or followed the sport — for probably over two decades, but a man who in childhood used to paste New York Giants box scores into a scrapbook, and who remembers, dimly but fondly, such folk as Whitey Lockman and Wes Westrum.

Carpe diem, I think.

With my lady, also a baseball fan of old, I go to a game. We have a great time; we go to more games, have more great times. I am becoming enthused. But I am considering and wondering — wondering about the mechanisms of run scoring, things like the relative value of average versus power. Originally an engineer by trade, I am right there with Lord Kelvin: ‘When you cannot measure it and express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a very meagre and unsatisfactory kind.’ I fiddle with some numbers; but I vaguely remember Branch Rickey’s work, the cover story in Life magazine for Aug. 2, 1950, [ed. note: it was actually 1954 and not a cover story] and think that I may not need to reinvent the wheel. I go to the San Francisco main library, looking for books that in some way actually analyze baseball. I find one. One. But what a one. 

If this were instead Reader’s Digest, my opening of that book would be ‘The Moment That Changed My Life!’ The book was Percentage Baseball, by one Earnshaw Cook, a Johns Hopkins professor who had consulted on the development of the atomic bomb. Today, when numerical analysis of baseball performance is a commonplace, it is hard to grasp how revolutionary, even shocking, were the concepts Cook was developing (Rickey’s work, which had quickly dropped off everyone’s radar, notwithstanding). The book was, and remains, awe-inspiring.•

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“I’m Not Sure They Could Capture The Complete Horror”

November 14, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

To the avid baseball fan, it would seem Billy Beane has ceased being an elite GM, the architect of Moneyball who could outsmart his peers, mostly because his interests are too broad. Among other things, he’s involved professionally with major-league soccer, computer software and finance. Beane’s restless mind stems in part from being a working-class kid who grudgingly passed on a Stanford scholarship he dearly wanted to accept in order to pocket a signing bonus from the Mets. Simon Kuper of the Financial Times was on hand recently when Beane caught up with author Michael Lewis, the two forever linked by baseball statistics, market inefficiencies and Brad Pitt. An excerpt:

“And so Moneyball became in large part the drama of Billy Beane: the autodidact who gave himself an education. When Beane was 18 years old, Stanford University had offered him a football and baseball scholarship. He and his parents – bright people without much money who had married young and joined the military middle class – were ecstatic. A good college was everything they wanted. But then the New York Mets offered Beane $125,000 to play baseball instead, and he felt he ought to do it. The movie shows the teenager, around the kitchen table with his parents in the simple family home, making the fateful decision. The filmmakers catch the scene well, but, as Beane says, ‘I’m not sure they could capture the complete horror.’

‘Listen,’ he adds, ‘I’m trying not to talk about myself here. I don’t look at life as a bunch of hindsight reviews of your decisions. But that’s exactly what I wanted to do, to attend Stanford University.’

Billy Beane was 18 when Stanford University offered him a football and baseball scholarship, but he went to play or the New York Mets instead

Beane’s life since – his compulsive reading, his discovery of the Moneyball system, his later discovery of soccer – is a long attempt to give himself the university education he never had. Just as Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google partly because they went to Stanford, Beane created Moneyball partly because he didn’t.”

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